It was easy to understand why Tony Pino had every reason to be upset and apprehensive. He would worry about that personnel folder and what I might do with it, and I doubted that it had anything to do with Larry Zipoli’s memory, or with protecting the grieving widow. The superintendent himself would never survive an exposé in the Posadas Register. Tony’s own gross negligence was clear in this case, and the superintendent knew it…enough so that he probably invented scenarios of me turning the records over to the local paper, even though that would never happen.
He should have fired Larry Zipoli years before. But if he thought that the sheriff would intercede on his behalf during an investigation, he didn’t know the sheriff very well.
Chapter Twenty-two
I ground enough coffee for half a pot, and then wondered if I’d made enough. The aroma of Sumatran beans sent my hand to the cabinet, and I had the cigarette pack in my hand before hesitating. Just one butt, the narcotic habit coaxed. But the pack hadn’t been unzipped, and I knew damn well that if I opened it, one cigarette wouldn’t be the end of it. With a grunt of impatience, I tossed the pack back and shut the door. Maybe tomorrow, after breakfast.
While my seriously pokey coffee maker tried to figure out what to do, I stretched out on the old leather couch down in the library-my own personal rotunda, the circular architecture reminiscent of a kiva. The arc of cherry shelving was a pleasure to the eye and touch, loaded now with my comfortable collection that favored military history. Three volumes lay on the coffee table near at hand, bookmarks indicating that I hadn’t finished any of them.
But my eyelids had concrete blocks attached, and the soft leather reached out and captured me. I tossed my glasses on the table.
This time, the telephone didn’t awaken me. Waiting for it to do so kept sleep at bay. I’d drift off and then jerk awake, unsure whether it had rung or not, then drift off again. Why not just ignore it, one part of the mind suggested. I don’t know what little break I was waiting for, or expecting. Mulling came easy, though, and mulling brought curiosity. There’s at least one advantage of embracing the life of a hermit. Nobody held a clock to my head. The more I thought about the sheriff’s story of the flood, the more my curiosity propped open my eye lids.
“What the hell,” I said, admitting defeat. I heaved myself off the couch. Armed with a Thermos of coffee and proud of myself for leaving the cigarette pack in the cabinet, I left the quiet house. Settling into 310 seemed like the natural thing to do, and with the engine idling softly, I turned the police radio’s volume up and listened to the silence for a few seconds. The county was typically quiet for the early morning hours of this Thursday. That would shortly change as school opened its doors for another season. I thought that the tradition of starting school with only two days remaining in the week was goofy, but they didn’t ask my opinion. Maybe starting with a two-day week gave kids a little hope.
Avoiding town, I headed southeast on State 61. A dozen miles or so would put me in María, a tiny village of two or three extended families with the dubious distinction of having the border fence pass a few yards behind their back doors. The state highway was narrow, without enough traffic to mandate a huge re-engineering job. Little attempt had been made to flatten the road bed, and it followed the ocean waves of the desert. If you went fast enough, you could test the strength of your stomach.
Critter surprises were the norm. Crest a wave and see a family of javalina wandering across the pavement, or an enormous diamondback stretched out on the warm pavement, or a coyote fixed in place by the approaching headlights.
Something like that might have happened to Crystalita Pino that dark night eighteen years before as she approached María from the east. I slowed for the village, passing through the wash of light from the Taberna Azul, so named because of the saloon’s blue door. Paulita Saenz, recently widowed by her husband Monroy’s death from cancer, ran the saloon without fanfare. How she managed to keep such order was a mystery to my department. I could count on one hand the number of times we’d been called to a bar fight. On the other hand, it would take an entire legal tablet to record the number of occasions when illegals had relaxed there before hoofing farther down the road in search of paradise.
Five cars were parked around the building, at least one of them with Chihuahuan plates, a couple others with the characteristic white of Texas. Had I been an ambitious deputy, I might have paused and tossed some plate numbers to dispatch. But I was musing and mulling, and that calls for peace and quiet.
Wally Madrid’s Texaco Station across the street was dark, and the scattering of houses behind it showed a light or two. It was hard to imagine a place much quieter, but a pounding thunderstorm would have dimmed the lights even more eighteen years ago. A mile beyond the village, the road humped up over a little rise, then immediately swung into the approach to the bridge across the San José Arroyo. With concrete buttresses and steel guardrails that left no room for shoulder, the bridge was certainly narrower than any current state standards, and when the traffic flow warranted it, would no doubt be replaced. Maybe they’d remember past fatalities and do something about the curved approaches.
The sedan’s tires thumped on the tarred expander strips, and I coasted across the bridge, continuing on for a tenth of a mile before U-turning and then pausing on the shoulder. If Larry Zipoli had actually seen the girl’s truck leave the highway, he could have been as much as a quarter of a mile behind her.
The concrete abutment showed a large, weathered scar on one corner, about eighteen inches above the ground-maybe from the Pino girl’s truck, maybe from any one of a hundred accidents before and since. I stopped and planted the spotlight beam on the abutment. Somehow, the girl had drifted far enough to catch it with her left front fender. To do that, she would have had to wander completely off the pavement, perhaps asleep at the wheel. Brakes locked in panic, she would have frozen as the truck skidded and then tipped wildly.
Easing the car farther onto the shoulder, I turned on the four-ways and found my flashlight. The night was bright, cozy warm, a hint of breeze, every star ever lit now on display in the heavens, the half moon bright enough that the desert features took on some character.
The San José was a dry ditch. I stood just beyond the abutment and played my flashlight down, trying to imagine the roar of millions of gallons of chocolate water, all the floating crap caught up to be flooded into Mexico. Crystalita Pino would have had that view in full stereo as her truck plunged over the brink, sinking its headlights into the boiling soup.
I swung the beam up the arroyo. Twenty-five feet wide at the bottom, a dozen feet deep, the arroyo would have carried a powerful torrent. The noise would have been a cacophony. No one thinks in a situation like that. I turned the light to the bridge. The concrete abutments provided lots of ways to snag a vehicle before the water finally snatched it away. In the dry of late summer, a vast collection of tumble weeds and their kin had been stuffed under the bridge by the wind. Immediately under the highway, the concrete was sloped and smooth. I could imagine that the water could have flung Larry Zipoli and the two girls around the back of the tipping truck, and somehow he’d managed to scramble to a point where the water kept him pinned against one of the vertical pillars, waiting in desperation.
Hell of a hero, I thought. Hell of a hero. Even Larry himself probably couldn’t explain exactly how the event had been choreographed. No thinking about how to do the impossible, he’d just done it, unthinking, in the best hero’s tradition. Sometimes it all works out, sometimes not. This time, he’d won.